The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to implementations of the claimed technology.
The advent of powerful servers, large-scale data storage and other information infrastructure has spurred the development of advance data warehousing and data analytics applications. Structured query language (SQL) engines, on-line analytical processing (OLAP) databases and inexpensive large disk arrays have for instance been harnessed to capture and analyze vast streams of data. The analysis of that data can reveal valuable trends and patterns not evident from more limited or smaller-scale analysis.
In the case of transactional data management, the task of inspecting, cleaning, transforming and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information is particularly challenging due to the complex relationships between different fields of the transaction data. Consequently, performance of conventional analytical tools with large transaction data sets has been inefficient. That is also in part because the time between requesting a particular permutation of data and that permutation's availability for review is directly impacted by the extensive compute resources required to process standard data structures. This heavy back-end processing is time-consuming and particularly burdensome to the server and network infrastructure.
The problem is worsened when an event occurs that renders the processing interrupted or stopped. In such an event, latency is incurred while waiting for the processing to re-initiate so that the appropriate action takes place. This latency is unacceptable for analytics applications that deliver real-time or near real-time reports. Accordingly, systems and methods that can alleviate the strain on the overall infrastructure are desired.
An opportunity arises to provide business users full ad hoc access for querying large-scale database management systems and rapidly building analytic applications by using efficient querying protocols for faster creation and processing of massively compressed datasets. Improved customer experience and engagement, higher customer satisfaction and retention, and greater sales may result.